For the heaviest data consumers on Sprints unlimited plan, the good times are about to come to an abrupt end as the company begins to throttle the connection speeds of customers on its unlimited plan.
The company announced its plans to throttle heavy data consumers on Friday. In the news release, the company asserted that the move to slow the connection speeds of some users is geared towards appeasing the masses — a notion derivable from the release’s title, “Protecting the 97%.”
Sprint iterates this point in stating that it aims to improve customer experience by protecting the bulk of its customers against the possibility of “a small minority of customers” consuming what the company refers to as “unreasonable” amounts of network resources.
That said, the company is implementing a new Quality of Service (QoS) practice applicable to customers who signup for the unlimited plan on or after October 16, 2015 — as well as those who opt to upgrade their handset on or after the date specified while retaining their existing unlimited data plans.
Our goal with QoS is to prevent some portion of that three percent going forward from negatively impacting the other 97 percent of customers.
In particular, those who use more than 23GB of data during a given billing cycle will be prioritized lower than other customers whose data usage has not exceeded the newly imposed limitation.
It’s certainly worth noting that the company’s new data throttling practice works in real time, managing the network’s usage as required. As a result, if the network is not constrained, no throttling will occur.
If 23GB of monthly data for “unlimited” data customers doesn’t sound like much, Sprint is quick to convey to the public at large that it’s enough to send 6,000 emails, view 1,500 webpages, post 600 pictures, stream 60 plus hours of music and 50 hours of video.
- Send 6,000 emails with attachments
- View 1,500 webpages
- Post 600 images
- Stream 60 hours of music
- Stream 50 hours of video
For those who always have their headphones in, listening to music streamed through the web, 23 gigs of data might not actually be that much. The same goes for those who spend a lot of time staring at their screens, watching videos on YouTube or streaming movies and series on Netflix.
What do you think, is 23GB enough?
